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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

While I'm out of town, toiling away at Odyssey Writing Workshop, I've decided to open up the blog to guest posts. Today, author Gruff Davies is stopping by to share some insight gained from his unique road to publication. His piece is a bit longer than my usual fare, but absolutely worth the read (especially to those of you still weighing your options between trade publishing and self-publishing). If you like what you read, consider checking out his website for more. Better yet, buy his book!~ J.W.

I Self-Published a #1 Amazon Best Seller, but It Was Dangerous. Don't Try This at Home . . .

In November 2010, I held the launch party
for my debut science fiction novel, The
Looking Glass Club. About six weeks
after launch, the book became an Amazon best seller. In fact, it reached #1 on Amazon
UK's genre best seller lists (Science Fiction > Mysteries and Crime). The CTO of Amazon
actually tweeted that he'd started reading it! I was beyond ecstatic as you
can imagine. You'd be forgiven for
thinking I'm now a card-carrying member of the self-publishing movement, but
I'm not. This is my account of just how
tough the whole process was and how close it came to being an absolute disaster. In retrospect, it was a rash and dangerous
choice that could have destroyed my writing career. Hopefully, this story will help you decide
whether trade publishing or self-publishing is the right route for you, and if
you do decide to self-publish, maybe you can glean from my experiences what to
do and what not to do to give your book—and your career—its best chance.

Firstly, let me say up-front: I have a
respectable strike rate with agents. I'd
already approached what I considered to be the top UK literary agency (for SF) with one of my science fiction stories early in my writing career and they loved
it and asked me for more. Years later
when I'd finished writing a mature draft of The Looking Glass Club they loved
that too, calling it 'a corker'—at first anyway. Recently, I submitted a sample of my second
novel—again to just one agent—and received extremely positive feedback. I've only ever contacted six agents in total,
and achieved a 1 in 3 strike rate, with two 'bullseyes' on first subs. So why on Earth would I choose to
self-publish in the first place?

Beware of the Hype

Well, partly, I was taken in by a lot of
hype about how easy it was to do. By all
the success stories. And it's true. Partly.
It is easy. But publishing a book is not the same as marketing a book and making it a
success. And if you self-publish, this is an enormously difficult thing to do, and it's getting harder, not
easier.

I realise now I was extremely naive about
the work involved in publishing a book in today's market. Understand that getting an agent interested
in your novel is really just the first step in a long process. It can take years of work and rewrites after
you finish writing what you thought was the 'final' draft to get it on the
shelf. Publishers receive enormous amounts of submissions, and use
agents as a quality filter. Some
publishers only accept submissions
from agents. Agents therefore receive
enormous amounts of submissions too.
They read a huge number of books per week each. One I met claimed to
read ten novels a week. That's two novels every day in a five day week! They are not reading your work the way a
reader would, for pleasure. They're not
reading your work to 'get it' they way you intended it when you wrote it. Agents
live on the commission they earn from books. They skim read.

They
read to reject. They have to, to get through their workload. And they have a glut of
choice of talented writers.

They're looking for commercially viable
prospects that will feed and clothe them and make them money in an increasingly
difficult market. Even if they've expressed initial interest in a book, if you
are not willing to mould that book (and indeed yourself) into something that
they think will fly commercially, they will rapidly lose interest. It can be a bit like X factor for books but without the dramatic music and fireworks.

I didn't understand any of this. It was my first book. I had a vision for it that I didn't want to
let go of. I was attached to it being my book, my way. I made major revisions to the book twice over
about 18 months based on their feedback but I didn't rewrite it the way one of the agents
wanted. He'd basically asked for a
complete rewrite and a simplification that I felt totally compromised the
integrity of the book. In the end, it
became clear the relationship was going cold and, frustrated and exhausted by
five drafts over six years, I finally snapped and decided, what the hell, I'll
publish myself. I didn't use any of the
existing services for authors though, like Lulu. They seemed expensive and low
quality. I wanted to be totally
professional—I wanted to publish as if I'd published it traditionally. I was just making my own a shortcut. I took advice from a friend who was very
senior at Bloomsbury, hired an editor, set up my own micro-publisher and tried as much as possible to mimic the process of trade publishing to ensure the
same quality. Paying an editor was a
great decision. But trying to mimic
trade publishing marketing was a big mistake, and I almost totally messed up
the marketing side. It could have ended
my career instead of boosting it. I was
lucky.

Very, very lucky.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Publishing

When I started out writing around 1999, I
was warned that new novels sell fewer than 2,000 copies on average. Around 2005 I was told that a quarter of a
million books were now published per year - a figure that staggered me. In 2010 more
thanthree million books were reported
published. Average annual sales for U.S.
non-fiction books are now fewer than 250
copies. I believe it's now about 400 for
novels. It's hard to get reliable
data though. That two-thousand-sales-for-a-debut
figure is now considered to be well above average. Averages are, of course, drastically affected
by the explosion of new self-published books, but, the uncomfortable truth is:
the more books there are published, the more competition there is in the market
and the lower sales will be overall per book.
In this new global world, you're competing with every other English language writer in the world. There's no escaping this fact. It affects you as an author whichever route
you take. And to make matters worse, people
are reading less and spending more time online.

It's not all bad news. The industry still
generates billions in sales, but the
best-selling books dominate those sales completely. In the few graphs of (questionable) data that
I've managed to hunt down, even when you plot the volume of sales against sales
rank on a logarithmic scale, the relationship is still one of exponential decay. It's a
double exponent. If that's just
maths gobbledegook to you, all you need to know is: if you're not in the top 1%
you won't sell enough copies to cover your marketing costs. Let me paint this another way: the Fifty Shades trilogy accounted for 1 in
every 20 book sales in 2012.

I hadn't any idea how hard it was to
promote and market a book before I tried it.
Naively, I figured, hey, I'm an experienced
entrepreneur, how hard can it be? I've
been on BBC Tomorrow's World (twice), Bill Gates presented one of my inventions
at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2003.
If I can get his attention, surely I can get anyone's; it's a great read.
A unique story and there's even a competition relating to the theme*; I'm well-connected thanks to my education
and social circles; I could pull some strings, ask for some favours... You get the idea. I completely bought my own hype. And I misled myself almost catastrophically
as a result.

Promoting a new book isn't like promoting a
new business, product or invention. All new novels are competing for the
same marketing space. All new products
are differentiable in their marketing promise. All new novels are conceptually the
same: they promise to entertain you while you read them. You're competing for attention with every other novel published - now perhaps
millions per year. Agents and publishers know this instinctively
because they do this day-in, day-out. I
didn't throw a huge amount of money at marketing my book, certainly not enough,
but I did ask favours of people: three wonderfully generous friends in PR in
the UK and US agreed to help. The
reaction from press editor they contact on my behalf was almost unanimous: practically no-one in the major press wanted to
know about it. It sounded too
complicated (a self-published SF book about physics and philosophy in this TV
era where TOWIE, X Factor and Britain's Got
Talent reigns?). Journalists are
busy trying to save their own careers from the tectonic shifts of the
technology era where profits from paper sales are dwindling to nothing and few in
publishing appear to have successfully worked out how to monetize the web.

Getting Reviews is Almost Impossible

After many weeks of zero press responses to
read requests (baffled apologies from my PR friends who are all very successful
at promoting other things), I began to panic.
I started to realise no journalist was even going to waste time turning
the first page of a long, complex novel by an unknown author. Why would they risk the time? I'm not Stephen Fry or Jordan. I had three
people on the case, and zero results. I
woke up in a cold sweat one morning realising the whole project could
tank. Then I remembered an old friend
from University wrote for New Scientist.
Could he help? I emailed him: No,
he'd already left to become a doctor, a more reliable career than journalism. Fortunately for me, he offered to pass my
details on to another journalist for the magazine, who, solely trusting the relationship, agreed to read my book.

After months of graft, one journalist had agreed to read my book. And it was via a personal contact of mine.

Realising I was going to have to take massive
evasive action to avoid a total disaster, I started to contact my own network in
earnest with thinly disguised pleas for help. Various people at my alma mater, Imperial College,
fortunately, were delighted to help - especially since the novel is partly set
there. In the end, I even hosted the
launch party at Imperial. I'm eternally
grateful to them.

Meanwhile weeks past and nothing from New
Scientist. I almost panicked as the
launch date approached. I was
committed. I recontacted some people
that some of my PR friends had and tried again.
Fortunately, another PR hit: a book had gone missing and I was asked to
repost it in time for a Science Fiction special. The editor emailed me a week or two later to
tell me it he'd found it such an exciting read he actually switched off X factor to finish it. A hint of sunshine in the gloom. He ran a whole page on me and the book, but this
was relatively small circulation magazine.
It was great PR but this wasn't going to turn into sales.

Then out of the blue, I heard back from New
Scientist. She was only half way through
the book but the journalist not only loved it, she thought New Scientist readers
would too. Especially the puzzle aspect. This call came fiveweeks after sending the
book off (during most of which time I was panicking). To my inexpressible relief she told me she
was wanted to set up an interview and planned to write up a
review of The Looking Glass Club in New Scientist's Christmas Special. New Scientist has a global circulation of
about 130,000 readers - many of whom are the just sort of people I knew would
love the book. I was overjoyed, but
mostly I was relieved.

Luck, Luck, Luck

As a result, shortly after Christmas 2010, The
Looking Glass Club went soaring up the best seller charts to reach the #1 spot on
Amazon UK's sub-genre category: Science Fiction > Mysteries and Crime. My credibility as a writer was salvaged. Had I not pulled out all the stops and achieved
a glowing review in a major publication like this, my book and career would have completely bombed. The web is full of people who will tell you
that the stigma of self-publishing is changing (and I believe it is, slowly)
but if my experience is anything to go by, don't think for one minute that you
will find it easy, if at all possible
to get reviews in anything with a decent circulation. Editors and journalists are bombarded with
book review requests from trade press as well as people self-publishing. They simply don't have the time to check if
your self-published book is any good. Requests from trade press are simply a
safer bet: they've been through at least
three experienced human quality filters that they respect: an agent, an
editor and a publisher. If you
self-published, you are very unlikely to get reviewed by a major
publication. You need to factor this
into your marketing. You need to do it
differently.

So, I'd managed the highly-sought-after
Amazon #1 ranking (on a sub-genre
list mind you, not a major genre or their overall list, these are in turn orders
of magnitude harder to get ranked on), now what? I hadn't a clue. I had no idea how to profit from this result
and turn it into more PR and more sales.
I floundered. I had nothing left
in my PR sleeves apart mini-competitions which generated piddling results by
comparison. Two weeks later, I lost the
#1 position and I never regained it.
Sales during that time accounted for the vast majority of the sales of
the book to date.

The following year, with Christmas approaching, I thought I should
employ a PR company specialising in books to run a six week campaign to promote
the book again. To be fair to them, they
advised against the timing and suggested a post-Christmas campaign would be
less likely to get lost in the noise. I
made the mistake of ignoring that advice.
Thousands of pounds later the result were: one radio interview on barely
known European station. Again, by using
my own contacts, I managed to get a second higher profile interview myself.

Now, I know The Looking Glass Club is niche,
but it is (apparently) a bloody good read if you happen to be my target market (it
gets consistently high star ratings and excellent reviews on Amazon and Good
Reads). I'm no celebrity, but I am quite
well-connected. The problem wasn't with
any of this. As an experienced
entrepreneur I thought I understood business and marketing, and that was my
mistake.

The problem was—is—the unique nature of
the marketing landscape for novels.

Pushing Boulders Uphill

Remember tragic Sisyphus, pushing his
boulder uphill for all eternity? Well, for authors that hill is has the shape
of the double exponent decay curve I mentioned before. It gets steeper as a double exponent as you
try to push your sales up and your rank down.
If I hadn't managed to get that review in the New Scientist Christmas
Special, my book would have sold minuscule volumes.

And, even during the period where The
Looking Glass Club was ranked as a #1 Amazon Best Seller, I'd set pricing as
low as possible to make the book attractive - I was barely making a margin on
each sale. My books were all print-on-demand
which is cripplingly expensive. Kindle
sales made slightly more but not enough to compensate. I didn't have the time (or knowledge, or
money) to do a guerrilla web-marketing campaign (I'm doing more of that now and
it seems to be a far better option for both publishing routes).

So do I regret self-publishing? Oddly, no.
I still think it was the right choice for me at the time. After six years of pain, I was done with the
book. I needed it out there. I needed to know there was a market for my
writing. I needed a confidence boost:
you don't really know if you can write until you have book sales and fans
writing in with wonderful praise. And you don't learn how to handle negative
criticism until people scorn your work publicly either. Yes, so far, I've lost money self-publishing
The Looking Glass Club but sales pick up for all books when authors publish subsequent
novels. It'll pick up again. What I
gained was self-confidence, very public praise for my work, credibility as
writer, proof there was market for my voice, and a brief but fantastic #1
ranking. But more than that I gained an
education about the reality of book publishing.

I've mentally put my losses down as the "course
fees" for that education. I hope
this blog post will save you paying the price I did for those lessons. The good news is: self-publishing can be a
platform to help you on the route to being trade published if your book does well. 16
of the top 100 books on Kindle for 2012 were self-published, of which only 5
remain self-published. That figure is
encouraging but do keep in mind the vast number of Kindle titles self-published
that year.

I'm happy to be wrong, but the data support
me in this: there aren't many options if you want to be a self-publishing
success story:

Be very famous already (or have a large following
somehow)

Write dozens and dozens of fun,
easy-read, cheap novels very quickly

Write well, have connections and money,
and work damn hard on marketing, or

Just be very, very, very lucky.

Whatever you do, set your expectations for
the long haul. Believe in yourself - if
you don't others won't. Don't rush the
process. Don't "end game"—enjoy
the writing process itself, because if you're going to be a writer,
statistically speaking you're probably not going to make much money from it, if
any at all. You may even lose money so
treat it like a hobby that you'd spend money on. If you write for the love of writing, the
other rewards are plentiful.

And if you work very, very hard at it. You might just be lucky enough to get into
that top 1%.

Good luck!

Gruff

Gruff Davies is an inventor, entrepreneur, and novelist and the author of the Looking
Glass Club. He's currently writing a second novel,
Supernova. A keen linguist, he’s also
the co-founder and CEO of Bitesized Languages, Kwiziq and French-test.com. He invented the Exertris Gaming Exercise Bike
featured on BBC Tomorrow's World and presented by Bill Gates at the Consumer
Electronic Show in 2003.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

While I'm out of town, toiling away at Odyssey Writing Workshop, I've decided to open up the blog to guest posts. Author Melinda Moore is kind enough to stop by today and contribute an entry to my worldbuilding series. When I'm back and defragged, I'll pick up where I left off in the series. Thanks very much, Melinda!~ J.W.

World Building Religion

by Melinda Moore

Over a decade ago I played in a Dungeons and Dragons game
run by my husband using a pantheon that he had created. Most of the players
understood and embraced the variations from real world religions, but one
player could never quite get it. He played a cleric of a goddess who raised
education above all else, but every time the player filled us in on what the
character was doing during his down time, the character would be polishing
candlesticks or reciting something similar to hail marys--- something from the
real world Catholic church. It never occurred to him maybe his goddess would
want him copying texts or tutoring orphans. He could not or would not buy in to
this different religion created for the game.

When writing, reader's buy in is essential. How do you get
them to accept a different religion for the time it takes to read your story?
Start with the idea that gods are people too. They need to have their own
motivations and histories. The Greek and Nordic gods are wonderful examples.
They have alliances, enemies, petty brawling and humans caught in the middle.
In the fantasy world I'm currently writing I have my gods united in the same
end goal, but they all have different ways of getting there. One reveres
education, one reveres sorcery, and one reveres strife.

Which brings me to my next point: the people should reflect
the desires of the gods. The people in the country of the goddess who upholds
education are governed by women, teaching is a prestigious occupation and
science is far more important than magic. Their next door neighbor worships the
god who holds magic above all else. They mostly are governed by men, but a
woman sorceress isn't that unusual. But on the other side is chaos because
their god holds up strife as the essential ingredient to the progression of the
soul.

The trickle down from gods to people ends in the details.
What are the religious leaders called? What do the structures look like where
they worship? Do the gods intervene regularly? For my world, I've tried to find
neutral words that people can still connect to. I use “mystic”
for the religious leaders though for a long time I was using “sage.”
I think both those words have real world religious neutrality but still imply
spirituality. The structures for the goddess look a lot like Greek temples
because the ancient Greeks had a love for knowledge and I'm hoping that will
subconsciously work its way to the reader. It's been much harder figuring out
the structures for the god of strife. For now I've settled on the very back of
the cavern the people dwell in as opposed to making a special structure out in
the open. The darkness seems to fit better.

But what about stories set in an alternate universe of our
own? I think in that case continuity and balance are essential. I know everybody
loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that world seems really off balance to me.
The demons and vampires had structure and hierarchy, whereas “The
Powers that Be” for the good just seemed to cross their fingers
and close their eyes and hope that Buffy and Angel would save the day again. It
never rang true to me that Buffy would never seek out any of the real world
religions available to her. A better example for writers to follow is Xena.
While it's ridiculous to think about the amount of miles Xena and Gabrielle
walked in the short amount of time they had, at least they made the effort to
seek out help from gods outside of Greece. They covered India, Israel and China
and a bit of Amazon religions thrown in for good measure.

Outside of good/evil balance, when writing stories about
religions in our own world where the gods make material gestures seen or felt
by the human characters, realistic reactions are important. In my novella “A
Sunset Finish” being published by JupiterGardens Press, my protagonist perceives the Tao or the Watercourse
way inside herself while her love interest has lived all his life seeing the
Sunset People--- guides to the afterlife for his pueblo. The protagonist always
feels like she's drowning in the Tao and is constantly on the verge of suicide,
making a rocky journey with her love interest who's been taught by the Sunset
People the sanctity of life. The push and pull of their religious experiences
provides part of the tension of the story. I think one of the reasons it got
accepted for publication is the believable reactions to each other and the
religious experiences.

So don't shy away from religion when world building. Embrace
it. For three hundred pages make your reader a believer in Xanton God of
Treasure of Kyra Goddess of Light. Just remember: Gods are people too.

Thanks to J.W. Alden for allowing me to guest blog here
while he's away at Odyssey. If you enjoyed my post please visit enchantedspark.com.
I talk about what inspires stories and host a monthly writing contest for a $30
prize.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

While I'm out of town, toiling away at Odyssey Writing Workshop, I've decided to open up the blog to guest posts. Today's entry comes from author Zachary Bonelli. I'd like to send a big thanks his way for offering some insight into the world of serialized fiction, a form that seems to be making a comeback these days. If you like what you read, consider supporting his endeavors!~ J.W.

Adventures in Serialized Fiction
Writing

by Zachary Bonelli

In 2000, I sat
down to write a novel. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I had the concept
of ‘novel’ in my head. I think I sat down to write whatever happened to flow
out of my mind and onto the page. Anyway, I started writing about this guy who
was travelling between alternate reality versions of Earth. What started out as
random vignettes turned into a fully realized novel.

I struggled
for many years to complete that novel to no avail. I straggled behind and
slacked, focusing on other areas of my life for many years. The ideas piled up,
and I wrote them down as notes, occasionally as small vignettes, and the
“novel” remained stalled.

Last year,
when I began working anew, I came to a very important realization. My novel was
not a novel, at least not in the traditional sense, but a sequence of short
stories, internally consistent and coherent individually, but which tell a
bigger, more epic story when you add them all up together.

This was not a
traditional novel, or even a trilogy of novels, but a series. The short stories
I had come up with were not chapters, but episodes. Those names are not
arbitrary. Episodes of a serial have important distinguishing features from
chapters of novel.

Chapters & Episodes: Distinguishing
Characteristics

1. Completeness

In a novel, a chapter does not
necessarily tell a complete story. An episode does. An episode has a rising arc
of action, conflict of some sort, and a resolution. Chapters may accomplish
these too, but they don’t have to. A chapter usually only produces momentum
toward one of them, and it doesn’t have to even do that.

2. Marketing

Chapters are never marketed to
readers individually, only as part of a complete story. Episodes are sold
individually, and may be collected up into groups, though it’s not necessity.

3. Length

Since episodes tell a complete
story, it’s difficult for an episode to be as short as a chapter. Depending on
your style, a chapter can be as short as a couple hundred words. Even expert
writers will have a hard time telling a complete story at that length, and
since episodes are marketed individually, they will need to be at a length that
will be palatable to readers. At the time of this writing, the minimum price
for an ebook on many vendors, most importantly Amazon, is $0.99 USD. At this price,
I recommend your episodes be at least 4,000 words long (that’s about 15 pages)
at minimum. Optimally, I would recommend an episode be about 8,000.

4. Time

It is unusual for each chapter in a
story to be separated by an enormous section of “missing” time. Perhaps the
author skips over a couple of hours of the characters’ lives that would be
uninteresting to the reader, or occasionally a couple of days of time, but temporality remains largely consistent (unless the whole point is that
it doesn’t, ala The Time Traveler’s Wife).In serials, each episode of the
adventure can begin presuming that any number of major events occurred since we
saw that character last. The scene movements and transitions inside the
episode follow the rules of chapters in a book, telling a coherent story by
leaving out only uninteresting bits of time. But episodes themselves have the
potential to be more “distinct” and “separate” from one another than chapters
in a book are from one another.Many serials utilize this technique,
but many others don’t. Nonetheless, it’s a technique that’s very difficult to
do with chapters of a novel.

~

It took a lot of energy for me to
realize that I was writing a serial at all. However, recent technological
advances have made production in the serialized format more practical than
ever, and we are poised for a resurgence of this style of narrative.

Now is a great time to experiment
with the format, come up with something new and original, and discover what
style works best for you.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

I'm just a few days away from my trip to Odyssey Writing Workshop, which unfortunately means I won't be able to visit any other IWSG blogs today as I make my final preparations. I have, however, opened the blog to guest posts while I'm away, and author Henry J. Olsen was gracious enough to write an inspirational piece for the Insecure Writer's Support Group on my behalf. If you like what you read, consider checking out his website for more. Better yet, buy his book!~ J.W.

Dream, Doubt, Determination

by Henry J. Olsen

There is no single blueprint one can follow in his or her quest toward becoming a secure, confident writer. Yet for many, there are three phases in the journey: the dream, the doubt, and the determination, as I've laid out below.

The Dream

For most of us writing begins as a dream, in which we envision ourselves churning out page after page of gripping, tension-filled literary drama. We imagine that the stories inside of our heads will flow out from our brains, through our hands, and into our notebooks or computers in a smooth and seamless fashion, requiring only a bare minimum of rewriting and editing.

Many people never venture beyond the dream, and thus their desire to write remains forever an unblemished fantasy. And perhaps that's just as well, for as with most dreams, the dream of being a writer is far more idyllic than the reality. Those who proceed forward may be surprised at what awaits.

The Doubt

One day, you take a leap of faith and begin to write. Suddenly, the dream becomes reality, but not in the way that you'd expected. Though you do in fact type page after page of text, you quickly realize that your work is nowhere near as intriguing as it seemed while the ideas were still brewing in your head. You reread your sophomoric prose and wonder how real writers craft sentences that are concise yet full of vivid imagery. You begin to wonder why you ever chose to write at all, and worry that perhaps never will you create a story that you, much less anyone else, will enjoy and appreciate.

What's worse is that you often can't keep your doubts to yourself. When friends and family ask what you're writing about, you struggle to describe your story in a way that piques their interest. When new acquaintances ask you what you do, you meekly tell them that you're a writer, finding the look of doubt in their eyes regardless of whether it truly exists or not.

What you don't yet realize is that the doubt you see in others is merely a reflection of the unease within yourself. No writer can exist in this state forever, yet how best can you escape it? One option is to give up. Few will fault you if you do. The other option is to push through the doubt, accepting that you may never escape it completely, and to write and create with a renewed determination.

The Determination

The determination isn't a thing you discover overnight. Rather, it's a feeling that grows as you push through your doubts and continue to write, eventually finding that despite your doubts, you do possess a certain pride in your abilities as a writer. It's the belief that with effort you can improve, and that it is possible to blossom into the writer that you've always dreamed of becoming.

Each day you come closer to understanding what it truly means to be a writer and not merely a doubt-filled impostor, frantically pounding away at the keyboard. With each chapter written you come a little closer to realizing that your voice as a writer isn't something you find, but rather a property that you develop over time. And finally, you come to see that if in your interpersonal interactions you express yourself with confidence, the people you describe your work to are often legitimately curious as to what you're writing about.

Determination can't completely replace doubt, yet in my experience I've found that adopting the right mindset is 90% of the battle against insecurity.

How do I know this? I know because my name is Henry J. Olsen, and I too am an insecure writer. Yet as of today, June 5th, I am not just a writer — I am also a freshly minted indie author. And though my book, The Northland Chronicles: A Stranger North, isn't likely to be mentioned alongside The Caves of Steel or Stranger in a Strange Land anytime soon, I'm still extremely proud of it, and I'd love if you could join me for a post-apocalyptic romp through the Northwoods.

In closing, I'd like to extend a big thanks to J.W. for allowing me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you